I heard that there is a way to use Vegas or some other tool to store data on a miniDV tape using a firewire port and camera as the tape drive. Anyone know how I would set that up? It'd be cool to be able to dump 11GB or so onto these cheap tapes...
There is some software around to it but I'd question it being cheap or quick!
DVDs are WAY cheaper, have random access and are MUCH faster.
Seems like a great idea until you think it through. There used to be a system to do the same thing using VHS tape as well and even before DVDs appeared on the scene even that wasn't so attractive.
Bob.
Yeah, 1 speed, having to use my camcorder as a drive, and no random access does sound crummy, but I'd still like to know how to do it. Dual layer DVDs are still expensive, so the thought of 11GB on a $4 or so tape is a little attractive...
Like Bob said, a pain in the butt and not cheap, but you can 'print to tape' and Vegas will record via a fireport A/D setup to a miniDV tape directly to your camea. Being a tad paronoid, I make three backups of everything I consider important, using three different types of medium.
1. 'print to tape' (mini DV tape)
2. burn a DVD
3. a copy to a removable hard drive.
My "logic" or paranoia if you prefer is thinking that if I have some kind of failure, then having backup on different types of media makes more sense then just multiple backups on the same media. Only through my own negligence did I once need to use my DV tape backup. I had made adjustments then foolishly used a file name I already had in use effectively destroying all my backups of a older file. My DV tape saved my butt.
If you do it this way render to the DV tape first writing to a hard drive. Then close your project and reload THIS file if you're burning a DV and it will fly along at a good clip not taking any longer, sometimes less then the length of the project to render the MPEG-2 version. This too then becomes the 'disk backup' version. I'm thinking of stopping bothering with DV tape since I purchased a Seagate 300GB external with BounceBack software. This is faster and while a second hard drive copy is on a seperate drive.
Can I "print to tape" data? Does it have to be a DV avi file? I'd like to zip up a bunch of files and get those onto the tape in some lossless format, if possible.